The Whirlwind Of Events Defies What We Know About The Slow Grind Of Politics

A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo. Sign up for the email version.

History Comes At You Fast

The rapid-fire series of events over the past 18 days has been as mind-bending a stretch in American politics as I can remember.

Less than three weeks ago, Donald Trump was awaiting sentencing for his conviction in New York state on 34 felony counts and needed to win the presidential election to have any chance of avoiding additional criminal convictions and likely jail time.

Then came President Biden’s Thursday night debate debacle, leaving the anti-Trump forces adrift in the doldrums over whether Biden should remain as the Democratic nominee.

The morning after the debate, the Supreme Court reset the playing field for most of the regulatory state, sweeping away its own precedent in Chevron and launching the political economy into a new era with uncertain but far-reaching implications that will take years to fully appreciate.

The following Monday, the Supreme Court rejiggered the balance of power carefully arranged by the founders in order to gift Trump an elaborately favorable ruling on presidential immunity that may keep him out of jail win or lose in November. As a result, his imminent sentencing in New York had to be postponed until at least September. But the constitutional framework will remain fundamentally altered long after Trump has passed from the political scene.

I wrote then that it had been a surreal week in our politics, but what’s happened since beggars belief.

After years of extolling violence and playing with the fire of incitement, Trump survived Saturday’s assassination attempt by a 20-year-old man with unclear motives who was immediately taken out by counter-sniper fire. The spasm of political violence at a campaign rally in western Pennsylvania killed one spectator and seriously wounded two others. It was captured in photos and video from a thousand different angles, yielding iconic images of a bleeding Trump with his fist raised exhorting the crowd to “Fight!”

Yesterday, Trump secured another major win in his effort to stave off imprisonment when U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon dismissed the Mar-a-Lago case against him in its entirety, freeing him for the moment from the threat of what had always been the most slam-dunk criminal case against him on the law and the facts, an assessment upended by Cannon’s corrupt handling of the case.

Within hours of Cannon’s ruling, having just announced Republican Sen. JD Vance of Ohio as his vice presidential running mate, Trump made a triumphal appearance at the first night of the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, his wound from the weekend gunfire conspicuously bandaged. The crowd serenaded him with chants of “Fight! Fight! Fight!”

What we’ve all just witnessed with our own eyes — the breathtaking pace of events, the mix of staged and spontaneous spectacles, and Trump’s uncanny ability to emerge mostly unscathed through a combination of extreme good fortune and corrupt intervention on his behalf — have all the elements of a fictional political thriller, but one we would probably find preposterous for lack of believability. The whirlwind of political developments has defied what we know about the long, slow, grinding work of politics and political change.

For those desperate to see Trump as a larger-than-life hero touched by the divine, the past three weeks are irrefutable confirmation of everything they believed to be true about the man. For those appalled by the sinister impulses driving Trump and the dark forces he’s unleashed in America, his swift series of wins on the political and legal fronts is an inexplicable reward for such despicable behavior.

The unrelenting pace of events echoes 1968, the standard for tumultuous years in politics, with the assassinations, an incumbent Democratic president who is unpopular despite his historic legislative accomplishments, and his party’s convention in Chicago. The backdrop is different. Then it was the Vietnam War, white backlash to the civil rights movement, and a generational moment as the baby boomers came of age. Now it’s the existential threat of climate change and a far-right politics that makes even the worst fears of a prospective Richard Nixon presidency seem tepid by comparison. The white backlash remains and is, it seems, eternal.

Our faces are pressed too closely to the glass of current events to see what the past three weeks portend for the next few months. The past may be prologue, but past performance is no guarantee of future results. The intense pace is not likely sustainable, but anomalies happen. The impacts of each of these events on the election outcome is inscrutable; their collective impacts are indecipherable. We just don’t know. We pretend to know, sometimes, because it offers a respite from the doubt and confusion. But we don’t really know.

A more Zen person than I would urge you to embrace the uncertainty. I’m just trying to hold on for dear life.

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